I’m building a new computer, which I haven’t done for many years, so this will probably be one of a couple threads with related questions.
Anyhoo, modern CPU’s apparently vary from 2-4 cores on a die, and I’m wondering whether or not its worth getting 4 cores. If I do, then due to financial constraints, I’ll have to get a CPU with a slower clock speed, so I guess that’s the relevant trade off.
My gut feel is that not much software currently uses four cores simultaneously, so I’m thinking I’ll probably get a two or three core CPU instead, but my gut is often stupid, so I thought I’d see what the Dopers thought?
ETA: Applications might be relevant. It’s mainly for code development and office work, but I do play games on it occasionally.
You didn’t mention brand. You can get a quad core AMD for the same price as a dual core Intel, frequently. I would drop money on RAM before CPU. 4 Gb at least.
Brute force processing and “crunching” such as, when using Photoshop plugins, 3D rendering, video encoding, etc. and also use software that can take advantage of multiple cores…
OR
Mainly surf the web, check email, play games, and work in Office type apps.
If it’s #1, I’d get as many cores you can get your hands on. If #2, go with more GHz and 2 cores.
Which games? Newer games like Far Cry 2 are heavily multi-threaded and will use all available cores. But games are heavily dependent on the video card.
Apart from the games, what you’re doing won’t tax either a dual core or a quad core.
Generally, the more cores you have, the smoother your computing experience will be because you’ve got more cores to handle those CPU spikes.
Start by figuring out which games you’re going to be playing, and buy for them. And get two monitors. If you purchase an ATI 5xxx card, consider three monitors.
Yea, they’re in the same price range, but for lower speeds. For the same money I could get a dual core with ~3Ghz, rather then the 2.4 GHz quad. So my question is if thats a good trade off. FWIW, I’m looking to spend ~100.
Yea, newer games are apparently multi-threaded, but there seems to be some debate on the internets as to the point at which diminishing returns set in vis-a-vis the number of cores.
Anyhoo, Tom’s Hardware seems to recommend a high end tri-core at my price point (around 100$) rather then a lower end quad-core for gaming. So apparently for the cheaper CPU’s you’re better off with a faster chip with one less core. Plus the price of tri-cores has dropped since they wrote the article (in December), while everything else appears to have remained static, so they’re apparently an even better deal now.
The software doesn’t have to specifically be designed to handle four cores. All the software needs to do is be multi-threaded. Windows will automatically run each thread in a different core. Most software these days is multi-threaded.
For office work you can get an old 1 core pentium and you won’t notice the difference. There’s very little office type stuff that will load the CPU in any meaningful way.
For code development, when you compile code you are doing a lot of number crunching, and it’s the sort of task that doesn’t benefit greatly from multi-threading. You’ll do better with fewer cores and a faster clock speed.
Games are multi-threaded, but you’ll do better with most games to use fewer cores and spend the money on the graphics card. It makes a huge difference when the CPU can offload the lion’s share of the work to the GPU.
